Jobs of the Future: Construction Progress Analyst

Published in

Hangartech

6 min readJun 7, 2018

At Hangar our mission is to impact as many industries as possible, by bringing the future into the present faster than it happens naturally. We spend a lot of time thinking about the benefits of technology as topics like computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence take the spotlight, but how will these emerging tools enable us to work in new ways? What roles will tech enable, that we don’t have today? What will be the Jobs of the Future?

The Heat is On

Schoolchildren are counting the days, community swimming pools are opening their gates, and charcoal bags seem to occupy entire aisles at the grocery store — summer is here.

For some, that ‘summer-is-coming’ feeling is felt by the growing anticipation of upcoming vacations — kids are out of school, the days are long and hot, you can almost smell the ocean air. For those of us in the construction industry, summer is foreshadowed by the seasonal hiring peak in the spring months that precede it.

Before we get too hot, let’s picture the kid on beach for a moment. He’s in a period of his life that supports the growth and exploration of his imagination. He can focus solely on the artistic design of his sand castle thanks to mom, who handles all the tedious logistics — the transportation of equipment, the site safety inspection, and the critical delivery of saltwater to ensure that all available sand reaches the optimal moisture level.

Fast forward 30 years to see that kid on a proper construction job site. Now he’s in a period of his life where it’s crucial to apply the imagination he once nurtured, because he can no longer rely on his mother for a supply chain of materials. In fact, material costs alone typically account for 40% of the total construction budget — not to mention the price of materials has increased by roughly 6.5% from the year prior (source).

The most straightforward way to reduce the cost of a resource is to reduce the amount you use, but that’s often not as easy as it sounds. With things like labor and materials, you can only eliminate a finite amount until you’re at a point where you’re unable to finish the project, because you won’t have enough materials, or people, to complete it.

However in the case of materials, there’s an opportunity for optimization. Of all the materials delivered to construction sites, 15% end up in landfills due to mismanaged scheduling and purchasing. Scale that across the nation and you’ll find that building-related waste makes up anywhere from 25–40% of the total solid waste stream — and that’s just in the United States (source).

4D Visual InSight

This all brings to mind the adage, work smarter, not harder. It’s no coincidence that this is also the central theme behind our construction monitoring technology, JobSight, which is used worldwide to track the progress of construction projects.

Our customers decide on how frequently to capture imagery of their site, and the project gets digitized on a regular basis — giving every stakeholder a visually rich and interactive view of the site, from start to finish. We call this 4D Visual InSight.

This means that any role in the process can inspect any phase of the progress: accountants can verify and dispute vendor claims with photographic evidence; GCs can make better, more informed decisions with visual context; owners can visit their entire portfolio without spending hours traveling; and everyone in the organization can keep an eye out for onsite safety, to name a few.

Work Even Smarter

When you deploy 4D Visual InSight across a portfolio of projects, the potential savings in both time and cost become astounding. The newfound abundance of unspent money will provide the industry with enough breathing room to analyze its own practices, and optimize their team for efficiency and impact. Remember — work smarter.

With that in mind, let us propose our inaugural Jobs of the Future job: the construction progress analyst.

The job description might read something like this:

Seeking detailed employee to be in 20 places at once. Share and collaborate with team members across the country. Make decisions from the desk, not the dirt.

And key responsibilities include:

Monitor and inspect raw material piles
Manage and facilitate procurement and resupply of materials
Ensure the correct location and organization of materials
Track the overall status of the project against its schedule
Knowledge and experience with drones not required

By using JobSight, the person in this new role can manage multiple sites at once — with a fresh perspective of the whole operation. It’s like being on the tallest crow’s nest perched above the middle of the fleet.

A Picture is Worth Millions

On the first day of the job, our new progress analyst will reform the material procurement process. Without the crow’s nest perspective, the inventory of materials needs to be conducted from the ground. Not only does this make it harder to get a holistic sense of what’s on-hand, but it’s temping to just forego the process in the name of saving time — just order more and let the excess go to waste at the end of the project.

However, with the new perspective, the progress analyst can monitor a site’s material inventory regularly — even daily if the frequency of capture has been assigned in JobSight. They’ll even have built-in measurement tools to calculate the volume of piles. Excess ordering eliminated; waste reduced; efficiency gained; money saved — multiplied by the number of sites managed by the analyst.

The next step is to overhaul the vendor dispute process. According to Arcadis 2017 Disputes Report, the average value of North American construction disputes is $21M, and 20% of disputes involve vendors, suppliers or other procurement channels. Disputes can take over a year to resolve, while the current average is around 15 months (source).

With JobSight, the progress analyst has a complete visual record of the project, and can use the software’s timeline to travel back to any date captured in the system — in 4D Visual InSight, the 4th dimension is time. So when a material vendor claims they delivered a load on a specific date, the analyst can verify the claim by looking at imagery from that day, as well as any date before and after. It’s hard to argue with a photograph.

In a 2017 case study, PwC reported that the application of drone technologies resulted in a savings of ~$2.94M of claims settlement litigation for just one project (source). Again, apply that to all the projects in the analyst’s catalog and the benefit grows exponentially.

Man and Machine

Robots simply enhance human capability, essentially delivering superhuman abilities previously reserved for comic book characters. They will transform existing jobs and create an innumerable amount of new ones. Not to mention save us an incredible amount of time and money, freeing us up to build more sand castles on the beach.